We've featured the advertising of Heinz plenty of times on Creative Bloq. The ketchup brand is up there with the best when it comes to print campaigns, often playing on the sheer ubiquity of its name in the world of condiments. So it's a little surprising that the its latest billboard is proving such a flop.
Copywriters have united in bafflement in response to an ad for Heinz pasta sauce spotted at a London Underground station. Aside from the weirdly dour monochrome colouring, the copy (and there's a lot of copy on this thing) appears to make absolutely no sense. The brand should have probably given this some more thought, in Heinz sight. (Looking for some decent posters? Check out the best print ads of all time.)
The ad features a bright red Heinz pasta sauce jar sitting among line up of black and white imitators. The tagline reads: "Too many pasta sauces to choose from. So we made the Heinz," Followed by "Ridiculously good. Ridiculously Heinz." ChatGPT, is that you?
"This is a terrible bit of writing. It makes no sense, it’s technically poor and it says ‘Heinz’ four times," tweets writer Ben Kay (it actually says Heinz five times). Meanwhile, plenty of commenters have pointed out that the implication of the top line seems to be, "there were too many of this thing – so we added another one." And then there's the question of what exactly is meant by, "The Heinz". Is The Heinz a common noun now? In the same way that Tannoy means 'public address system' and 'Google' is a verb? If so, I've no idea what it means.
Still, at least Heinz can take some solace from the fact that it's created some advertising bangers (not the kind you put ketchup on – lol!) over the years. From asking AI to draw ketchup to recreating its logo using fast food, the company gets it right more often than wrong.
